Posts Tagged ‘TCTW’

Yesterday, we played The Clay That Woke for the first time (Paul Czege, Half Meme Press, 2014). I’ll do a separate post overviewing the game, later. For now, my impressions of play:

Overall: Fun. Emergent story in a weird exotic world, with moments of character awesomeness, interspersed with first-night rules confusion.

There were a lot of breaks to debate rules and meanings, maybe no more than any other first night with a new game, but they weren’t things we could really look up in the text. So we proceeded with uncertainty, and were carried along by our enthusiasm. I think the second session will go a lot smoother, and we’re all looking forward to seeing where things go for our minotaurs.

Thoughts:

We had an awkward start, with 3 minotaurs in 3 different places — I don’t do well with separate scenes for every player — but we eventually got going in a rhythm of round-robin scenes. I can see that we’re moving towards getting all the PC minotaurs together eventually.

Some scenes that I had planned (movings) didn’t come to a clear inflection, and I realized that I had included them as exposition.

We paused often to debate how the Silence applied in certain situations. When a minotaur speaks out against an injustice, is that following the Silence or breaking Silence? If he keeps quiet, isn’t that also breaking silence? So, as a GM, am I setting up no-win situations? Is debating this part of the intended play experience, or are we just misunderstanding something that’s meant to be clear?

Unfortunately, the minotaurs’ initial lack for names means I’m calling the players by their own names during play, something I normally try not to do. I guess I could call them by their archetype instead: “leader, advocate,” etc.

At first, priming the Krater represented a big break from the fiction, but we got good at it quickly, and by the end of the night, we could do it wordlessly. The few dozen seconds it took, and the players’ resource decisions, really built tension. Drawing the oracle inspired nervousness. After the draw, everyone dove for their menus of Krater outcomes to interpret it for themselves.

As the GM, playing Intrinsics with weird ideas is FUN, really fun. So is playing Voices.

Scenes/Movings:

The perwiiga tree jungle encounter went well. Tense moral argument. Ry drew from the krater (earned a Name token, I think), and decided to keep 3 of the seeds. He later used 1 to save a man crushed by a scourge, and used Regard to ensure that another seed would get planted deep in the jungle where a new perwiiga tree would grow to maturity unmolested.

The situation at the gladiatorial games changed quickly. Mike lead a worker’s revolt, and now the Games will determine ownership of the arena and the workers! Unexpected, and awesome.

The gladiator minotaur was grievously injured. Two players then decided that their minotaurs were twin brothers, and they have now secretly switched places so that the “gladiator” can remain in the games. The advocate must fight, and the soldier must treat the wounded. This should be interesting!

I burned through about 3/4 of the movings that I had prepared – which is the perfect amount, I think. Some things resolved quickly, and some really dug in hard.

A few further thoughts from Ry:

I was fucking awesome. I killed two scourges and dealt with the Bright. Then I got cocky and I got tricked out of Silence really fast. My herd needs to be a big part of next chapter.

The game was asking a lot of you as the GM. There’s a certain possibility or going with the flow that the game rewards for a player character. So the GM has to do a lot of work even just getting the players to be in the same place at the same time. We were quite disconnected.

We wondered about want versus need and speaking up about injustice.

I got the sense that thinking like an intrinsic is really crazy crazy crazy hard.

I came away with the thought that the game needs more color visuals during play.

– – – – –

There’s still a lot more of this game to see. We are just getting to the point where PC minotaurs are going to run out of tokens for the first time. No one has gone frantic yet, we haven’t seen Truths or Gifts yet, and no PC minotaur has earned a name. Looking forward to exploring it further.